Once a pipeline hits production, the clock starts ticking. Data sources drift, requirements change, and scale eventually breaks your initial assumptions. The architecture that worked yesterday is almost immediately facing its next bottleneck.

In this field, success isn't about finding a silver bullet. It's about engineering for the chaos before it hits.

That’s why we’re calling this IncrementallyHQ. We’re here because we believe the only way to build anything worth keeping is to get 1% better every day. No giant leaps - just one PR, one query optimization, and one lesson learned the hard way.

We’re starting this newsletter to document our journey. We want to build in public, share the real-world, unpolished realities of working in data, the architecture wins, the debugging nightmares, and the lessons learned along the way.

Essentially, this is our brain dump - unfiltered.

Meet the Team

• Nazmi Asri: Our pragmatic architect who has spent a career building AI and data workflows from the ground up in the world of Fintech and Banking. He’s less about the hype and more about the real-world grind of making a modern tech stack actually play nice together. He’s the reason our architecture remains grounded in logic rather than just buzzwords. Outside of work, Nazmi is a bit of a technical article junkie, always hunting for the latest trends.

• Jeremy Tee: Our infrastructure anchor for all things streaming and cloud spend. Whether it’s a streaming pipeline having a meltdown in the middle of the night or our cloud spend suddenly trying to hit a new high score, Jeremy is the one who pulls us back from the edge. He’s the reason our systems stay both rock-solid and lean. Outside the terminal, he’s recently fallen deep into the running rabbit hole.

• Abid: Our heavy lifter for the weirdest technical bugs. If there’s a deep-seated technical bottleneck or an architectural knot that no one can untie, Abid is usually the one fixing it. He’s the reason our engineering standards stay high and our systems remain resilient as they scale. When the laptop is shut, he’s usually decompressing with a gaming stream or deep in books related to self-improvement and growth.

What’s Actually in This Newsletter?

We aren’t interested in rewriting documentation you can already find on Google. We want to talk about the “Synthesis” of our work:

• No-BS Architecture: The “teardowns” of our tech stacks - why we chose them, how we built them, and exactly where they let us down.

• The Cost of Data: Real talk on FinOps. How to keep the bill from spiraling while optimizing complex ETL pipelines for performance.

• The “Plumbing” for AI: The unglamorous infrastructure work required to make LLMs and agentic workflows actually useful in production.

• Scaling the Humans: Our notes on building teams - from hiring and setting engineering standards to the messy reality of jumping from IC to Lead.

• The Failure Archive: An honest look at the debugging nightmares and architectural dead-ends we’ve hit, so you don’t have to repeat them.

A Shared Space

We want this to be a collective home for fellow builders. If you’ve got a hard-won lesson or a nightmare debug you want to document, the door is wide open.

We’re excited to build this. Let’s get to work - incrementally.

— Nazmi, Jeremy, and Abid